Eli Slack: Project 4 Relief Mapping

 Concept:

I’ve been an artist for as long as I have been physically capable of holding a pencil. Recently, I’ve been feeling nostalgic and wanting to go back and look through my old art from middle and high school, sort of put all my pieces together chronologically and be able to actually see the progression of time as my skills improved. Artistically, I have a focus on the human form, so I thought it would be compelling to have my own face besides the documentation of my art, sewn together through family photos and selfies, to roughly match what I looked like when I drew the correlating sketch. I’ve done my best to compile images from photo albums, from the dregs of my grade school portfolio, and even old USBs that have turned up under mysterious circumstances. The purpose of this piece is documentation, and a sort of retrospective of my career, with a focus particularly on my younger years. I’ve grown and changed, my identity certainly has, and my art has morphed to reflect those changes along the way. 

Technique:

I chose to do the two heads, so that my art could be projected on one, and my face the other. With a photo of me at my first ever art competition as the introductory photograph, the heads then fade in, flickering impossibly fast as hundreds of images cycle through. Collecting and compiling all of the images took the most man hours, up until I ran into processing challenges. I calibrated the 3D shape, imported it into MadMapper, downloaded Blender and UV-unwrapped the .obj file, then imported that into Adobe Illustrator to make an SVG file of the lines. 

After I had done that, I uploaded those SVG lines into MadMapper and realized that it just was overlaid as another layer, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it read as the UV interpretation for the file already in the project. Another idea I’d had for this piece is to include speed-draws of my more recent work as tiles on the planes of the ‘art’ face, and then individual videos of myself that I have collected through the years as the planes of the ‘artist’ face. To make this happen, I used the triangle tool to map out a surface over every single triangle on each face, since the projector saw then from different angles, so that I could plug in a video into each individual segment. 

This idea, however compelling that it might’ve looked, has proved to be too high-concept for my laptop and has crashed the program many times. It is, to be fair, a lot of video files. My laptop is currently completely unresponsive and thus I fear I have to scrap that idea as well. Unfortunately, the lagging of my device has made it impossible to get a clean recording of the work, so I have provided what I am able. 

The first scene goes smoothly, and the second one starts to stall as it prepares to load scene three, which is the most taxing processor-wise. This causes it to skip and stop and then fully bypass the video scene as well as most of the comet scene following. I am looking into getting a new laptop. 

Interpretation:

I like the concept I was working with, but ultimately limits were established by the medium that I could not move past, at least on this device. I wanted the piece to have a legible meaning, but I'm unsure if that carries through in the state that it is in. The piece opens with me as a child at my first art competition, and closes with a much more recent photo of me, mirrored, at the last Spring Show held at the SP/N Gallery. I am still learning this medium, but I can still recognize the progress I have made.